Casting the ‘New Woman’ in the Weimar Republic, 1919-33

By Harlee Rozell

Edited by Evanthea Hammer and Kiki Shim

Harlee Rozell graduated from Ohio University in May of 2017 with a B.A. in History and Anthropology as well as a certificate in Geographic Information Science (GIS). She intends to pursue higher education in Museum Studies. While an undergraduate, she was the president of the Ohio Student Anthropology Society, a writer for the department of Anthropology and Sociology and the research assistant of multiple professors in the Anthropology department. Currently, Rozell is preparing graduate school applications and continuing independent research on multiple projects she began during her undergraduate career while also working full-time.

On January 30, 1929, men and women flocked to the cinema, all prepared to be dazzled and amazed by the artistry of G. W. Pabst’s newest film, Pandora’s Box. As they took their seats and the movie began, they were thrown into the story of the vivacious and captivating young Lulu, surrounded by the many beautiful furnishings of her apartment, particularly a large and extravagant portrait of herself. The audience soon discovered that this enthralling woman is a prostitute. As the story developed, Lulu is thrown into precarious situations where she must must use seduction to escape, and she eventually becomes engaged to a wealthy older gentleman. In the end, this femme fatale is accused of the murder of her betrothed, and must flee persecution through a series of mishaps, bringing an unhappy demise to herself and those that assisted her. This story became a trendy schematic for tales of women produced at the time in both films and novels, advocating the dangers of becoming a 20th century femme fatale.[1]

During the transitional period at the end of World War One, many nations granted suffrage and equality to their female citizens as a reward for their hard work and dedication in the war effort. Germany, and its recently formed Weimar Republic was no exception. With these newly won rights, the iconic ‘New Woman’ (die neue Frau) was born. The struggle for a new identity led to a redefinition of gender roles, and unearthed growing anxieties of modernity across the world.[2] As time progressed and these worries grew, the New Woman was heavily characterized in media and propaganda by negative stereotypes, thus reinforcing the growing concern of female equality and masculinization of women around the world. The New Woman provoked similar concerns in the Republic, becoming synonymous with words like “unromantic” and “masculine,” which called for a refinement of what it meant to be a man, as well as a woman.

Past scholars, such as Sharon Boak, analyzed popular fictional novels of the time and came to similar conclusions about public anxiety toward the New Woman.[3] The Weimar people were terrified of female independence and equality, and how those freedoms would impact male identity. This view of the New Woman was evident in many aspects of Weimar culture, causing her to be negatively personified in movies (Pandora’s Box, for example), novels, and even works of art. Moreover, historians Brian Peterson and Marynel Ryan Van Zee ascertain that although Germany offered its female citizens inviolable equality, the reality of this equality was precarious due to growing apprehension of male and female roles in society.[4] In art, the New Woman was masculine and rough, while the mainstream public, through the influence of films and literature, depicted the New Woman as hyper-sexualized and dangerous.

While many scholars have explored Weimar’s New Woman, few have offered a clear synthesis of the New Woman in Weimar. Many briefly explained the stigma, or examined it in only one aspect of Weimar’s culture-politics, but none combined the many facets of culture and politics to acquire a better understanding and image of the New Woman by Germany’s standards and stereotypes. Some scholars have even argued that the personification of the New Woman at this point in history was negative across the globe, while having not clearly defined and explained what this representation was.

This research will explore the many aspects of Weimar popular culture and politics in order to gain insight and understanding of how the New Woman looked and behaved to the people of Weimar Germany. Relying on Weimar’s cinematic masterpieces, popular fictional novels, constitution, propaganda, and works of art, this work makes clear that the German citizens created a negative stigma and persona of the New Woman due to distress surrounding changing gender roles. [5] But how did the creation of the New Woman – which symbolized a great change in the Weimar Republic’s politics and culture – demand newfound definitions of both masculinity and femininity? First, this paper investigates Weimar’s political atmosphere to better grasp the hyper-sexualization of the New Woman in the work force and domestic domain. After observing the politics of Weimar, it surveys the New Woman in Weimar’s popular culture and uncovers the visual representation of the New Woman in the role of the dangerous, and sexualized femme fatale. Finally, it combines the insight gained from these aspects of Weimar Germany into a coherent cast of the New Woman – and the new man – of the time.

Law, Propaganda, and the Unromantic Working Woman

As women gained equality in the Weimar Republic, the New Woman emerged, and society began to see her as a threat to normativity: the role of men and women in status quo, pre-World War One society. The Weimar Constitution gave women suffrage and inviolable equivalence to German men, but the fear of an unromantic working woman drove the Weimar people to treat the New Woman as unequal and incapable of independence. This was problematic, since the New Woman in Weimar was best defined as “the independent woman who was assuming a new identity as a result of her participation in the work force.”[6] Propaganda and laws, although promoting impartiality, favored males over females, especially in labor. But through differing feminist movements, women discovered ways to embrace and enrich their ever-changing roles in Weimar society. Nonetheless, female autonomy was juxtaposed by the Weimar people’s fear of female independence and its effect on male identity, which resulted in unequal treatment and representation of women everywhere, despite their new legal liberation.

According to the Weimar Constitution, all Germans were considered equal, thus “men and women [had] the same fundamental civil rights and duties.”[7] Appearing to embody equality, the constitution still controlled the bodies of Weimar women. This control was clearly noticeable in the doctrine’s outlawing of abortion and restricted rights of women in marriage and divorce, allowing traditional, civil, and criminal laws to remain patriarchal, thus perpetuating inequality.[8] An example of this treatment is seen in Social Democratic propaganda, which portrayed women as equal, yet always a step behind men. In the propaganda poster Women! Equal Rights – Equal Responsibilities! Vote Social Democratic! (Figure 1), used to promote female voters for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a woman is depicted as standing literally behind her male counterpart, while his arm is around her waist, symbolically guiding her in the right direction.[9] This imagery demonstrated a growing fear of female ignorance and emancipation; women had to be told who to vote for, and could not make decisions without the wisdom of men.

Many Weimar propaganda campaigns also placed women and men within social constructions of masculinity and femininity. Vote Item 1! Social = Democratic (Figure 2) is another propaganda poster promoting the vote for the SDP. It depicts a resilient and robust semi-nude male worker, displaying a cold triumph over his antagonists[10]. The man is over-masculinized through the portrayal of his chiseled, unclothed torso and arms. This hyper-masculinization was in part to strengthen social ideas of what it meant to be a man, but can also attributed to the public’s increasing need for a strong, divisive line between what was considered feminine and what was thus inherently masculine. The continued division of gender roles in Weimar propaganda posters shows the increased concerns that women and men alike were testing social norms, and traveling beyond the boundaries of previously accepted gender roles.

Increased involvement in the workforce led the New Woman to be considered a threat to social protocol. The public was infatuated with the concept that emancipation made women “unromantic, destroying the notion of the ideal woman and leaving instead a woman with bodily instinct,” while even having advocated that working outside the home made women less suitable mothers and wives.[11] Many Weimar promoters of conservatism felt that urban women (i.e., the New Woman) “were in danger of placing individual pleasure before family and nation, causing them to neglect their ‘natural’ duties in the sphere of motherhood and child-rearing.”[12] This led many political parties to stress the role of motherhood to its female members, like the propaganda poster German Woman and Mother! Think of the Future of Your Children! (Figure 3) produced by the German Democratic Party (DDP). In this poster, women are framed in a feminine stereotype – as mothers. Weimar citizens saw motherhood as such an essential role in German life, that they chose to protect it in their legislation. Article 119 of the Weimar constitution asserted that, “motherhood [was] placed under state protection and welfare.”[13] The translation of the poster reads “German women and mothers” on the heading, demonstrating the society’s need to place women in the role of mother in relation to her role as a citizen.

Weimar people feared that emergence in the workforce would prompt women to discard altogether the traditional roles of mother and wife. The unromantic working woman was often labeled as unpatriotic, due to the public’s anxiety that she wished to postpone marriage and motherhood until later in life in order to advance in the work force.[14] Motherhood became an unmistakable role for German women of the time, holding with it their rights to citizenship. As one scholar commented, “if citizenship for men was a function of their ability to provide military service to the state, the argument went, then citizenship for women required some other basis. The service that women provided was in their capacity for motherhood.”[15] In the example of Lulu from Pandora’s Box, she showed no concern for or want of a child, but instead longed for material goods and ways to acquire them. If women were now taking on the role of breadwinner, instead of full-time mother and housekeeper, what roles and jobs were then left for the Weimar men?

During World War One, women had greater access to a larger variety of jobs, regardless of whether or not the work was considered masculine or feminine. After the war, women were shunted into positions society considered feminine, since men could legally lay claim to their pre-war jobs. The ‘feminine fields’ were mostly comprised of low-skilled industry positions, as well as poorly paid clerical and secretarial jobs. Likewise, women comprised a massive sixty-nine percent of the textile industry, and merely eleven percent of factory council members in textiles, making them grossly underrepresented while comprising the majority of the labor force.[16] Female workers were also disproportionately represented in rural areas, but the politics around this representation varied insignificantly compared to the male rural representation rates.

In spite of their legal equality, women in the work force were consistently troubled by sexism and discrimination. As one scholar boldly noted, working women faced the daily reality that “forced them to take an objective view of themselves and their situation, yet the future was sufficiently hazy so that they could retain the hope that they somehow might escape the fate of their mothers through an individual stroke of luck,” meaning that the New Woman felt hope that she may not be placed into the gender constraints the women before her were forced into.[17] This struggle was not unequivocally common to working class women, but was also shared by women within every social and educational sphere. For example, in the field of economics, women used sexism and social constructions of womanhood to define and advocate for new roles in the work force through their participation in different bourgeois women’s movements.[18] Likewise, leaders of different women’s movements encouraged women and society to accept the New Woman’s role in the labor market, emphasizing that females were best suited to educate young girls and potential mothers, while women doctors were a necessity to treat female patients.[19] These ideas served as a double-edged knife, which hindered and subjugated the New Woman, causing her to feel derision if she were not professionally tethered to the role of mother and caretaker.

Similar to other nations of the time, Germany granted female citizens lawful equality and suffrage at the end of World War One. From emancipation, women gained new powers never before given them; they could legally take part in the many freedoms and privileges that males had had for centuries. These legal changes forced the Weimar public to reconsider previous gendered roles, and create new identities for men and women alike. Though freedom was given to the women of Weimar after the war, many women were nonetheless expelled from their wartime jobs.[20] The New Woman no longer held the traditional female roles of mother, wife and keeper of the home, which sparked a need for redefining gendered norms and conceptions within Weimar’s popular culture.

Cinema, Art, Literature, and the Image of Female Independence

As the 1920s approached, mass culture began to play a prominent role in the everyday lives of the German people, meaning popular culture creations were now more readily available to the masses. This mass popular culture prevailed most in the forms of film, literature, art, media and radio. Through painters such as Otto Dix and actresses such as Louise Brooks from Pandora’s Box, the German people were introduced to vivid images of the New Woman in popular media. They also began to distort the image of masculinity, attributed traits to women that were once considered masculine and generated a new definition for the roles of men in both media and as actors in the life of New Women. These images also exposed self-determined women in very negative means, showing a growing fear of female self-motivation and independence in the Weimar Republic, as well as a masculinization of feminine gender roles.

Film held a unique and notable role in the lives of everyday Weimar people. In 1929, Berlin housed 369 cinemas, totaling 189,692 seats, and between the years 1920 to 1925, roughly six million Berliners attended the cinema per year.[21] This trend was not restricted to the city of Berlin, and throughout Germany cinematic interest increased substantially. “Germans attended the cinema regularly and watched melodramas, comedies, travel adventures, and newsreels in grand, newly built movie palaces.”[22] Not surprisingly, “the number of cinemas nearly doubled from 1919 (2,836 cinemas with 980,000 seats) to 1928 (5,267 cinemas with 1,876,600 seats)”, while attendance levels skyrocketed, surpassing 250 million viewers a year in the mid-1920s and 320 million by the end of the decade (averaging seven annual tickets per adult).[23] Although large cities housed the bulk of cinemas and their customers, film took a major role in popular Weimar culture and created an atmosphere of impression on the German people.

In popular movies that aired between 1919 and 1933, the New Woman was typically seen as self-governing and liberated, while turning to culturally immoral methods to support herself or her family. For example, in the less popular film The Joyless Street directed by G. W. Pabst, starvation drove a woman to attempt prostitution so that she could provide food for her family.[24] At the end of the film, those she loved stopped her from undergoing something they considered wicked, and ‘saved this woman from herself’. In Pandora’s Box, the main character Lulu and her friend, Alwa, proposed the idea of prostituting themselves to afford Lulu’s escape from a jail sentence of five years. These two famous and well-known movies depicted women in different respects of German thought; one woman that of purity and love, willing to sell her body to help those she cares for the most, while the other depicted a woman who prostituted herself for the advantage of no one but herself and those imprudent enough to assist her escape from prosecution. In both films, the independently-minded femme fatales made the decision to prostitute themselves for gain, an action that was considered immoral for any woman.

The portrayal of the dangerously immoral New Woman in cinema echoed its impact throughout many respects of artistic expression. For example, the poem “Kino” (Cinema) by Bruno Schonlank, expresses that beautiful girls swallow the lies and extravagancies of the New Woman in film, allowing themselves to be led away from traditional morals and values. A section of this poem reads:

This poem articulated the growing concern many Weimar people shared towards the shifting role of women in society. It contends that “beautiful girls” carelessly and unquestionably followed the example of immoral, materialistic women in cinema, only to discover their lives are not nearly as grandiose or exciting. Schonlank wrote that these gorgeous ladies were led astray by experiences and sensations that enchanted their souls, meaning that the persona, wants, needs, actions and behavior of New Women like Lulu in Pandora’s Box became idolized. Young German women went to the cinema and saw extravagant and pretty women, and then wished to be like them in every way. They longed for the adventures and misadventures the New Woman was always portrayed to have, and men like Schonlank feared that those longings would ruin the future of family values and womanhood.

The notion of an autonomous woman selling herself, whether physically or emotionally for money or goods became a distinct premise in many German works of the time. For example, the fictional novel entitled The Artificial Silk Girl, written by Irmgard Keun, followed the life of a young woman who dreamt of becoming an actress. With the struggle of inflation and the Great Depression, this woman used her charm, beauty, wit and sexual advances to get what she needed, even to the extent of being homeless and relying on wealthy men buying her meals throughout the day.[26] This book clearly described women to be at a significant disadvantage if they fell outside the “social conventions of education, marriage, and family,” all conventions which were most commonly held before World War One.[27] Doris, the leading femme fatale in the novel, conformed to the typical cast of the iconized New Woman; she followed her own desires, leaving destruction and corruption in her wake.

Not unlike many disparaging tales of independent women that were created during the Weimar Republic, Doris’s ending was one of thought provocation and sobriety. As her journey of selfishness continues, she learns many lessons of love and life, culminating in her acknowledgement of Weimar society’s ideal ‘morality’ for women. The last line of the novel, “perhaps glamor isn’t all that important after all,” showed the readers that Doris turned away from her independent, materialistic ways to embrace a more simplistic lifestyle.[28] Within the context of Weimar Germany, a simplistic lifestyle meant that of the morals and ideals shared by Germans before the emancipation of its female citizens, and the construction of new gendered roles for men and women.

Painters, like the majority of citizens in the Weimar Republic, were not shielded from the influence of discrimination towards the New Woman. One disturbing trend in art was a portrayal of lust murders (Lustmord). This artistic fad was defined as “sexually motivated murder/violation of female corpses,” and recurrently appeared in the works of artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz.[29] In his work entitled John the Sex Murderer (Figure 4), George Grosz painted a menacing man with large black eyes walking away from the brutal murder of a naked woman.[30] The woman is decapitated, her right arm is cut off just beneath her shoulder. This violent imagery of women became commonplace in many artworks created at this time.

Otto Dix, one of the most popular and well-known Weimar artists of his day, created similar artworks of mutilated and butchered women. In one painting entitled Lustmord 1 (Figure 5), Dix portrayed a naked woman in bed, her genitals exposed and her lower abdomen cut open and her sex organs placed outside of her body. It would appear that the woman was also partially decapitated, like that in the painting by George Grosz (figure 4). But Dix did not just paint women as victims of sexualized murder, he also painted distorted and masculinized portraits of many women who fit the physical description of the New Woman. Semi-Nude (Figure 6), “presents a blowzy hermaphroditic figure; a powdered male heads sets on a shambling female form.”[31] Another, titled Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden (Figure 7), portrays an independent woman in an almost frightening manner. She is hyper-masculinized, with chillingly long and thin fingers, shown drinking a martini and smoking cigarettes, sporting a masculine hairstyle and wearing dark, dreary make-up. Also known as Sylvia von Halle, she was a reputable author and journalist in both Germany and England who frequented the Romanisches café in Berlin.[32] According to Von Harden, Dix was fascinated with her complicated history as an independent woman who fled her Dutch family due to the constraints on women by Catholicism, and begged her to allow him to paint her portrait.[33] When she asked him why he would want to paint her – as she had a negative self-image – his response was that “her portrait would be representative of their era”.[34] He was not incorrect, as Sylvia Von Harden (Halle) was undoubtedly the image of the New Woman – one not of poise or appeal, but intersexuality and a fascination with the abrasive and bleak.

The people of the Weimar Republic formed impressions of the New Woman and expressed them through her portrayal in the arts. These renderings of the New Woman showed the world fear and condemnation of the stereotypical femme fatale and her impressions on women of all classes and ages. Whether she was depicted as fickle, manipulative and self-centered as Lulu from Pandora’s Box and Doris from The Artificial Silk Girl, or as masculinized and mutilated, as seen in the paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz, the New Woman was always burdened with negative qualities.

Conclusions

As Lulu, the main character in Pandora’s Box, believed she was making her escape to freedom, a dastardly fate befell her. This fate sent a chilling message to women everywhere, expressing to them the dangers of independence and self-motivation. Jack the Ripper, a serial killer from Industrial England (c. 1880) who became a universal symbol for the fate of immoral women, murdered Lulu. This form of mutilation and murder became a familiar ending to many fictional females who stepped outside of the conservative societal norms of pre-World War One womanhood. It served a lesson to all women who attempted to redefine their roles in society, and became a major theme in art, poetry, film and prose.

The Weimar people feared that the New Woman cared only for “romance, sex, and those aspects of culture relating to personal emotions,” rather than politics and motherhood.[35] Through propaganda, politics and law the people attempted to define new roles for men and women as its female citizens explored suffrage and equality. Because of her growing involvement in the work force and out of the home, the New Woman was subjugated to discrimination and inequality, despite the constitution’s claim to her inviolable equality with men. The growth of this unequal treatment in society showed the people’s inability to cope with changing gender roles for both men and women.

With female suffrage and full citizenship, masculine and feminine societal norms were subject to numerous unprecedented changes. Those vicissitudes produced fear, and the New Woman was thrown into the limelight of popular politics and culture in the Weimar Republic. Having examined Weimar’s most admired films, well-known fictional novels, constitution, propaganda posters, paintings and poetry, this work demonstrates that German citizens clearly created a negative stigma towards the New Woman out of concern due to changed gender roles. It was with these reformed roles that the New Woman was cast and began to embrace her changing involvement in German society.

[5] Like in any diverse nation, not every citizen feels the same about a given political or social agenda, ideology or scenario. The people of Weimar Germany were no exception to this; their population was filled with both liberal and conservative people, both New Women and women accepting of traditional gender roles and constraints. For the purpose of this paper, I will be referring to “the Weimar people” (or any other way the citizens of Weimar are discussed) as a collective of people living in Weimar at the time who were distressed and/or upset about the drastic change in gender roles for men and women; those that were enraged about female suffrage and even those angry about the growing number of women in the work force. As the evidence shows throughout this research with propaganda posters, popular novels and movies, poems, and even paintings, this idea of who and what the New Woman was was shared by the majority of Weimar citizens, especially those with the influence and ability to create these posters and reinforce these stigmas.